All We Are Told Not to Touch by Leticia Del Toro – NWVS #169

$15.99

In All We Are Told Not to Touch, Leticia Del Toro offers us poems as fresh as jicama, burning sugarcane, and a fishing village at dusk. Like the bougainvillas that take root and bloom memories all around us, she guides us along mysterious shorelines and into lonely cemeteries, where we honor the living and the dead. These poems let us touch “what dreams some women may have” before they are gone.
–Juan J. Morales, Author of The Handyman’s Guide to End Times

 

“This is a mesmerizing collection, a multi-sensual turning of voices, idioms, and languages as we travel, take flight, sense our lives, bodies and the possibility of intimacy and love. Yet, we move at every turn, we visit, for a moment, we notice the shores, the child, la abuela, the street, the play of things that appear and dissolve around us as we approach. There are emergencies, killings, graves, and ashes to be swept from cemetery markers. Culture, ancestry, history, the acrid daily news of violence and the geographies of day-to-day life merge into these conversations, perhaps whispers to the self, a self on fire, a self that envelops the larger multiple body. Is it love? Perhaps love, perhaps, if it can be touched. I am moved by this collection, in particular by its blurred lenses, senses, its arousals, its lures, its boldness and daring. Incredible, a new accomplishment. Bravissimo del Toro, Bravissima!”

—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus

 

“In All We Are Told Not to Touch, Leticia Del Toro has expertly and seamlessly brought together distinct cultural and linguistic strands of poems…each in English and Spanish, draws essence, shape color and meaning from the culture that feeds it. Distinct yet equally power in its circular motion. No easy task but superbly achieved by the poet. Felicitaciones, Leticia.”
–Lucha Corpi

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Description

All We Are Told Not to Touch – NWVS #169

by Leticia Del Toro 

$15.99, paper

979-8-88838-026-0

2023

ALL WE ARE TOLD NOT TO TOUCH explores the places and moments where we are told danger exists:  the rogue waves of the ocean, the unwelcoming side of a border, a street where girls are forbidden to play and the implacable grief surrounding a brother’s death, among others. Each poem unfolds with a desire for what is out of reach.  The poet’s travels and meditations come to life in both urban and rural spaces such as San Francisco, Paris, Barcelona, as well as in villages in France and Mexico. All are interconnected points of the spiritual, physical and sensual journeys required to love and heal.

Leticia Del Toro is a Chicana poet and fiction writer from the sugar refinery town of Crockett, California. Extended travels to her parents’ home state of Jalisco, Mexico as well as explorations in Spain and France, also inform her work. Leticia’s writing has appeared in DrumVoices Revue, Cipactli, Huizache, Zyzzyva, About Place Journal and more. All We Are Told Not to Touch won First Place in the New Women’s Voices series for Finishing Line Press. Her fiction chapbook, Café Colima, was published as the 2017 Kore Press Fiction Prize.  Additional honors and awards, include the Eliot Gilbert Prize at UC Davis, a Hedgebrook residency, a Rona Jaffe Award at Bread Loaf and a Story Knife residency. Leticia has also thrived in the writing communities of VONA, Macondo and Círculo de Poetas. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature from University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in English from the University of California at Davis. While writing is her passion, her most creative work is expressed in teaching, motherhood and arts activism.

MAESTRAPEACE Mural, ©1994 and 2000, Juana Alicia Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton, and Irene Perez, All Rights Reserved.:
“Original artwork appears from the San Francisco Maestrapeace mural found on http://www.maestrapeaceartworks.com“

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